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Lunch » Tags » Fiction » Reviews » Homebody: a book

Homebody: a book

4 Ratings: 2.5

Orson Scott Card spins a ghost tale with a different take

Like its haunted-house centerpiece, Card's third dark fantasy novel (after The Lost Boys and Treasure Box) has great potential that shines through its superfluous detail. The Bellamy mansion is a venerable Victorian pile that has seen better … see full wiki

Tags: Fiction, Novel, Supernatural Thriller, Ghost Story

1 review about Homebody: a book

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Card Spins a Pretty Good Ghost Tale!

Dec 18, 2009

by MichaelN

Rating:

Card spins another good ghost tale (see Treasure Box) about Dan, a man with a troubled past (he blames himself for the death of his daughter) who has given up on relationships and now makes a living buying old rundown houses and restoring them.

Dan comes across the old Bellamy house which was built a century earlier by a man who wanted to give the perfect house to his wife. The couple were big society people and after they died, the house fell into the hands of various disreputable individuals and became a speakeasy and a brothel until ending up as an apartment house for college students.

The house has been deserted for about 10 years and the closest neighbors are two "weird" old women who live in what was once the Bellamy house's carriage house.

Dan buys the house and finds that it is not as abandoned as he thought. Additionally, the weird neighbors prefer that he destroy the house rather than fix it up. As the book progresses we see that the house in not just an inanimate object but possibly a living thing.

During the book Dan has to wrestle with his past and becomes the "crying-post" for his troubled real estate agent as well as his houseguest.

I really enjoyed this book and held back from giving it 5 stars only because I thought that Dan missed too many obvious clues about the "secret" of his houseguest and that I would have liked to have learned more about the house in its glory days.

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